Modern Wisdom - #638 - Kevin Kelly - 22 Habits To Follow For A Happy Life

Episode Date: June 8, 2023

Kevin Kelly is the founder of Wired Magazine, a futurist, author, and public speaker known for his insights on technology’s impact on society. Working out how to live a good life is complex. However, having rules from someone much older and wiser than you can make this a lot easier. Kevin has condensed a lifetime of insights into a few hundred sentences in his new book, and today we get to go through some of my favourites. Expect to learn why you should do everything you can to avoid being a billionaire, how to have a more optimistic outlook on life, whether you can trust websites with the word ‘truth’ in them, why you are more likely to be defeated by blisters rather than mountains, how to understand yourself better, the best way to turn bad days into good ones, why what irritates you in other people is a lesson about you and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://bit.ly/sharkwisdom (use code: MW10) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM)  Extra Stuff: Buy Kevin's new book - https://amzn.to/3IOFVck Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - 00:00 Intro 05:38 Why Should We Be Optimistic About the World? 10:23 ‘Don’t Be the Best, Be the Only’ 17:06 Dealing with Bad Days is the Secret to Moving Forward 20:27 How Your Weirdness Will Bring You Success 23:52 A Great Way to Understand Yourself 26:53 Why You Should Ignore Websites That Have ‘Truth’ in the URL 29:40 Ask Stupid Questions 36:14 How to Prototype Your Life 44:38 ‘Pain is Inevitable, Suffering is Optional’ 46:22 How to Reason with People Better 49:11 What’s Really Behind Conspiracy Theories 53:09 Importance of Attending to the Small Things 54:22 What Kevin Learned About Leadership from Steve Jobs 57:34 Celebrate the Present 01:00:42 Why You Can Never Be Too Kind 01:05:18 Where to Find Kevin - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Kevin Kelly, he's the founder of Wide Magazine, a futurist, author and a public speaker known for his insights on technology's impact on society. Working out how to live a good life is complex, however, having rules from someone much older and wise at the new can make this a lot easier. Kevin has condensed a lifetime of insights into a few hundred sentences in his new book, and today we get to go through some of my favourites. Expect to learn why you should do everything you can to avoid becoming a billionaire, how to have a more optimistic outlook on life, whether you can trust websites with the

word truth in the title, why you are more likely to be defeated by blisters than mountains, how to understand yourself better, the best way to turn bad days into good days, why what irritates you in other people is a lesson about you, and much more. Very, very cool stuff from Kevin here. Little aphorism, me, sort of, Maxim, quote, things, and we get to break them down, and I get to ask him questions, and it is very, very cool. The guy is super, super smart. And I love digging into the insights that someone has taken and entire life to accumulate. I really, really hope that you enjoy this one.

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That's surfshark.deals slash modern wisdom. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Kevin Kelly. Your new book feels like it was purpose written for me. Massive plan of aphorisms, massive fan of pithy, short life advice. For the people that haven't read it, I notice a trend throughout the entire book, which is one of optimism and hope. And at the moment, I notice on the internet a current rhythm of serious cynicism, people believing that the world can't improve, that the people who hope that it can are the ones that are genuine need the problem.

What's the case for optimism? Why should people be optimistic at all? I think there's three reasons why you should be optimistic as you possibly can, understanding that it's somewhat a temperament, but actually, I think it is a skill. And the first reason is that if you read any history at all, you soon, and look at the evidence and the actual science, you have to conclude

that progress is real, and that the conditions that generated that progress are still working at work in the world, and that this will statistically, probably continue for a while. That's one reason. The second reason is that we know from the work of child psychologist that people who are optimistic thrive better, and they understand. They, the psychologists understand that one of the ways you teach children is called learned optimism to be more optimistic is to have them come to understand

that setbacks are only temporary. They're inevitable, but they're only temporary. And then the third reason is that it's the optimist actually are creating all the cool things that we need and there is making our lives better. All the optimist is someone who envisions a world or something that they want to have and can believe, believes that it's possible. And that belief in that envisioning help make it come about, because the really good things that we want are so complicated,

they're not going to happen accidentally, inadvertently. You actually have to imagine them and have to believe that they're going to happen. And that requires optimism. And that's why, basically, it's the optimist who are shaping our future. How much do you think that people can nudge that disposition? One of the easiest ways is to change your time horizon.

If you look out beyond just next year of the year after, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, it becomes much easier to be optimistic because that that's low growth, that slow compounding of progress can overwhelm even fairly serious setbacks and downturns and disasters even. And so which are hard to kind of accept or even to confront with the short term. But if you take a longer term view, along horizon, then you have the ability to kind of see that they can be overcome and that goes back then that the setbacks are just temporary. I suppose this stops you from confusing noise for signal that you have little ups, little downs, but you're trending in a direction over a broad enough time horizon, the trend is obvious.

Right. And it's also has to do with just the supreme power of compounding interest, compounding things. So even if you're only increasing or improving or creating a few percent more than new destroy, if you compound that over time, it becomes a very, very large consistent force. And then I guess the fourth thing I would say is I am optimistic, and I think others should be too, not because of disregarding or dismissing our problems. We have to be real. There are problems and there will be new problems that are more powerful.

I'm not too mystic, not because the problems I think are smaller than we're aware of, but because our capacity to solve the problems is increasing even faster. So we're not being polyanna and dismissing the problems when you're optimistic. You're just saying, no, we're trusting the future, the future generations in our own skill for solving problems continues to increase.

That's an amazing case for it. I'm really trying to rail against this trend, this sort of fashion of cynicism on the internet at the moment. And I really, really want, I've called it toxic positivity because I need to come up with something. I call it radical optimism, and yeah, radical optimism is my term for it. For me, actually, my friend Lewis has militant optimism, which I thought is even cooler. That is cooler, yeah.

Right, okay, first one, don't be the best, be the only. What's that mean? This is sort of at the core of the book. It may be my own philosophy. It suggests that achieving the best is kind of what we're taught to do is to be the best in things. But the best by definition is a very narrow, very narrow niche. There can really only be one. is a very narrow niche. There can only be one. You're limiting the numbers and your chances of achieving that. Also, because it's someone else's definition of success, it also excludes most likely you in your own particular set of abilities and capabilities. And so if you head towards becoming the only,

that's a much wide open area that is potentially full of a billion different only's, all of them pursuing something different. And in a certain sense, what you are getting to do is to invent a new definition for its success. There's a famous novel quote where he says, become the best at what you do, keep redefining what you do until this is the outcome. Exactly.

So you're kind of coming up with your own definition of success and aiming at that. And by the way, it most likely should not include a billion dollars. Right? Because you actually don't want a billion dollars. I mean, literally, this is my other piece of advice, not in a book, if whatever you do, try your hardest not to have a billion dollars. Because it's going to ruin your life. And a couple million fine, but not a billion. because it's gonna ruin your life. And a couple million fine, but not a billion. Why? Oh my gosh, it's imprisoning. It's a burden. It's terrible for your kids. It's, it becomes,

it overtakes your life. It becomes never present. You can't actually spend it as fast as it you earn money back. The only thing you can do with it is give it away, and that's now another whole other job and for all its own complications. It takes over your life, and so you're now a slave to the billion. I have a friend who owns a very big sportswear company. His net worth is three times Drake's net worth. So

the one of the most famous rounds in the planet. It's like over two, I think it's he's worth two, two and a bit bill. Right. Okay. I went to a place called Nando's in the UK with him, which is a famous chicken chain that exists. We sat down for dinner on an evening time, five o'clock, and he was sat playing on his phone and his EA and his EA's PA was sat a few tables across and they were working on their laptops. And I remember thinking as I was sat with him, imagine the problems that Drake would have encountered if he'd tried to come for dinner at Nandoos with me. He wouldn't have been able to get within

two miles of dislocation without being absolutely mobbed and yet The guy that sat up at me is sat there with no security. He's sat there. No one hassling him No one really even paying attention to him And what it got me thinking about was The price that people pay for the level of wealth that they have, and that there are differing prices that people can pay. Maybe a billion full stop, regardless of your level of scrutiny is something that you shouldn't try name for,

but there's within that, you think about Drake, it would be mobbed by paparazzi and press, and people would be coming up to him, and he wouldn't be able to get any peace, and he'd need a million security guards, and he'd have to speak to the restaurant beforehand, and there will be coming up to him and he wouldn't be able to get any peace, he'd need a million security guards and he'd have to speak to the restaurant beforehand and to be crowd control. And this guy that sat up at me gets to just play Sudoku on his phone or do whatever he's doing beforehand. So the price that you pay for the wealth you have is something

that I'd never considered before. Well, yeah, I mean, there's a little bit of conflation between wealth and fame. So it's not breaks wealth. It's his fame. And famous is you do something you definitely do not want to aim for at all. Some people are famous inadvertently like like Obama. He can't really help that. But aiming for it is crazy because it is imprisoning and completely debilitating for the very reasons you say. So that's something that you think you might want, but you really don't. And my advice on that is read a book about any famous person,

really famous person, and you'll see what the consequences of that is. It only begins in where you're describing it extends even further. But wealth is equally, not equally, but there's another kind of tax that you pay for it. And that's maybe the best way to put it is that there's definitely a tax for that wealth and it will be paid out and other things. All else to say that when you're defining your success, it should certainly include other things in money because that's simply not the most important thing. It should certainly include other things in money because that's just simply not the most important thing. And it's, you know, your success and having been around the people who have a billion dollars, it's really funny because the billion, they're asking the same questions that all of us are asking,

which is, what do I do when I grow up, right? I'm going to how old you are. And the billion dollars doesn't give them the answer to that. Okay. It actually contributes to the problem because like where do I go from here? and how old you are, and the billion dollars doesn't give them the answer to that. Okay? It actually contributes to the problem because like where do I go from here? And so, that definition of success, and that's for me the joy of seeing people who are pursuing their own definition, and it might be that they've told control their time, which I think is one of the highest forms of wealth, rather than much of money, is the most abundant thing.

Money is abundant, but the scaricest thing is our own time. And having control of that is my definition of true wealth. In your opinion, then, should people take most of the opportunities that they can to trade wealth for time? Yes, absolutely. then should people take most of the opportunities that they can to trade wealth for time? Yes, absolutely. In fact, that's what really rich people try and do, although not very successfully, but yes. And it's much easier, I'd say, one of the bits of advice is that the rich have a lot of money, the wealthy have control of their time, and it's much easier to be wealthy than rich. Okay, so I like the post when I'm with among my, my billionaire friends,

that I'm the wealthiest there because I have total control of my time. I don't have to worry about my entourage, the EA's, the personal assistance, whatever it is, it's like, no, it's, I have my time. What you do on your bad days matters more than what you do on your good days. For sure. And that is going back to the kind of basic understanding we have now of habits and that what you want to do is have something that will get you through the bad days because everybody will have them.

And if they stop you or pede you, that's something you want to overcome. You want to be able to just kind of absorb them to understand that, okay, today was a bad day. I didn't get much done, or whatever I was working on failed, or I was rejected, whatever it is. But tomorrow, I get to try again and do, I'm gonna do again, I'm gonna make some more, I'm gonna try another idea.

And so how you deal with the bad days is really the secret to kind of moving forward. Tim Ferris once said he wanted to design his life to be able to crush the average Tuesday. And I just thought it was such a lovely way to put it. And I spoke to a friend, Rob Deardick recently, and he said he wants his average, he's optimizing for the normal Tuesday. He just wants the normal Tuesday to be as enjoyable as possible. That's okay.

Let me think about that. That's that's an interesting way of, um, right, to the average Tuesday is your best day. I don't know if you're, you say optimized. So he wants it to be that an average Tuesday has as much enjoyment in it as possible. Right. Doesn't need to be spectacular. Right. Just needs to be normal. As good as it gets is an average Tuesday has as much enjoyment in it as possible. Right. Doesn't need to be spectacular. Right.

Just needs to be normal. As good as it gets is your average Tuesday. Yeah, that would be, or yeah, I'm just, you know, you've got me now trying to think about how I make this into the atheris, the atheris coming out. Yeah, right. Yeah, so, but the impulse, I think, is correct. And that is, you know, your life basically is what you make on your average Tuesday in a certain sense. Yes, it's way more average Tuesdays than there are peak experiences.

Right, so I love the idea of a good bad day as well, that you get out of beds and, oh, there's been some sort of nightmare at work, or there's a flood, the toilets backed up and everything goes out the window and yet when you look back at the end of the day, you still consider it a success or you are fulfilled or you feel it. Right, right, right. Yeah, so there's some of you, yeah, making that you're a worst day, still an okay day or something that you can feel good about. Yeah, that's interesting, is you're sort of trying to elevate, not your elevate your highest day,

but you want to elevate your worst days so that they're not so bad. Correct. Bringing that safety net up. Right, that's interesting. Although, yeah, I mean, there are disasters and things that can be your new worst day. You know, having three kids There's a lot of disasters and things that can be your new worst day.

Having three kids and getting older and been around, they're just unexpected days or way beyond your control to become a bad day. I suppose what you're trying to optimize for is on average, high lows rather than higher highs. Exactly. You want your average bad day to be. Yeah. Okay. The thing that made you weird as a kid

when they use successful as an adult, why? I have seen so many people like this. Oh, I think you forgot the last part. If you don't lose it. So the idea is that a lot of people are kind of weird as a kid and they kind of put that behind them, but you want to keep that thing, you want you want to nourish it in some way and cherish it.

And it's not just the child likeness, it's the fact that there's something in you that's inherently different than others. And it's that difference that we're trying to accentuate and emphasize and grow and cultivate because the difference is what makes the wealth and the innovation and all these other things possible. And the reason why we're not being duplicated by robots, the more the more special and unique and weird you are, the less likely you're going to be replaced by AI. So, um, so that kind of weirdness in them is often a suggestion, a reflection of your inherent makeup and dispositions,

tendencies and abilities. And we tend to get them beat out of us. As we go through school, looking for a job and trying to be the best in something. And so if you can retain some of that or return to it, I think you have a higher chance of being the only rather than being the best. I love that. I think it's a more pure view into, or a clear review of your passions before they become molested or perverted by other incentives, by money, by status, by prestige, by sex, all those things. I remember reading this amazing story about one of the world's most successful color pickers.

So this lady would choose color wheels for the best fashion houses in the world, the best interior design companies in the world. There was an interview that was done with her and she was asked, how is it that you're so good? You've been the best in your field at this. What's your training being like, talking me through your process? And she said, well, to be honest, I'm not formally trained in this, but when I was nine years old, my parents bought me the biggest crayola crayon set that was available and I used every single one of them down to the nub. And I thought that is somebody who was weird in childhood and didn't lose it when they got to adulthood.

Exactly. And there's tons and tons of stories. I'm counting people like that all the time. And a lot of people, I mean, basically, ideally, you'll have a business card and your occupation should be pretty unique to yourself. And that is happening all the time. Right now today, that's to me, the beauty of technology and why I'm a big booster of it, is that it gives us more and more options. It permits more and more people to find their genius and share it in ways

that you cannot do before the invention of, you know, the symphony or cinema or laser, all these enable new ways of expressing. And somebody somewhere is born with that right combination if we can get them matched up. A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, there's a little bit of, if you find it irritating, Yeah, there's a little bit of, if you find it irritating, it's a signal that this is resonating with you in a certain way, and it doesn't mean that you are like that. It just means that you have something in you that's particularly attuned to this and that you should investigate it to be sure that you're not like it. But even if you are not like it, that is indicating something about yourself that you haven't really kind of explored yet. And I think my basic premise, I know this from the colonified self movement,

which we started, is that we're opaque to ourselves. We're kind of like the last to know about ourselves in many ways. Both collectively as humans, we don't know how our brains work and why we do things. But even individually, we have we're blocked in some ways from accessing our true understanding of ourselves or even our memories or motivations and we need a lot of discipline as well as outside help to Understand ourselves and this is another tool in that toolkit of trying to come to understanding about ourselves there is a When you see somebody else that is being irritating

It when you see somebody else that is being irritating, it activates inside of you, it triggers something inside of you, which resonates with a part of your own makeup. I totally totally agree. I think that it's so interesting to consider how self-disceptive we are. Evolutionarily, it makes total sense. If you need to kid everybody else that you're not a complete freak that talks to themselves into shower, does all of the myriad weird

idiosyncrasies stuff that we do? The best way to convince them that you're not mental is to not believe that you're mental yourself, which means that you are the easiest person to fall by yourself and the last person to know. And also, is also another evolutionary advantage which is you really don't want the ego to be able to mess around too much in your fundamental operating system. Absolutely. The base code should not be taken care of. Right. And so you don't really want to have easy access to that,

because you'll be messing around with it otherwise. And so there is a kind of a deliberate distancing that we do just to keep operating. Protect the vital systems. Exactly. Yeah. Well, I mean, imagine to take it to an extreme imagine if you had to consciously think every time you

wanted to breathe or every time you wanted to digest food. It's just a difference of degree to roll that up toward your view of your own status or what you find attractive or etc. You can ignore any website with the word truth in its URL. Yeah. In any email with something similar with a really good bargain. Yeah, it's, it's, most of my knowledge has been channeling the ancients and the Stoics and the

Bible. This is not one of them. This is a much more contemporary one based on my own experience and what I've seen in the world. So I could be wrong about that, but generally that's a good heuristic and real of them. What do you think about the, you can ignore any science that's got the word science in the title heuristic? I haven't heard that one. Social science.

Christian science? Yeah. Yes, yeah. Social science. Yeah, I don't, I wouldn't say we could ignore it, but yeah, that there is a parallel, I had not thought about that. What it, what it means is that you need a lot more evidence. So like any kind of even, whether the social science, but even in medicine, you, we can't

really make policy based on just one or two studies. We need, you need hundreds of studies. And that's because the body and sociality is so complex that even unlike physics, where one or two experiments can tell you a lot in these arenas, you need hundreds of experiments. Modia, more multivariate. Right. Just over time, all kinds of variables eluded. And so, by the way, this is why I'm very, very reluctant to make policy now based on social

media because we haven't done the hundreds of experiments. There's one or two experiments about the consequences of social media, and it's just like having one or two medical studies. You just should not be making policy based on just the handful that have been done, mostly in the US and not even around the world. So I'm a big advocate of more and more constant testing and knowledge and investigation and persistent doing it again. Unlike the FDA where they do it once and then they approve it and then they were tested again. That's also not really modern. And so right now we just an AI will be it's a whole

other thing because we've done almost zero and it's like a year old who knows anything. So trying to make policy based on whatever might have come up is just completely ridiculous. We just don't know enough yet. Don't be afraid to ask a question that may sound stupid because 90% of the time everyone else is thinking of the same question and is too embarrassed to ask it. Right, so I was a kid who sat in class up in the front row and I asked all the stupid questions and people would come up to me all the time saying, thank you for asking that question. I was too embarrassed to ask it. So, for some reason,

I wasn't embarrassed to ask this stupid question. Why do you think that's the case? How can people become less embarrassed to be stupid? I don't really know the answer to that one. I've never lacked self-confidence, and that's another question that people have is where you just come from or where do you get it, and I don't know. I think it may have something to do with a lack of empathy, meaning that I kind of didn't care what other people thought. Like, for a stop. Yes. It really does care. It's thinking about other people and I was not thinking about other people. It was like, I wasn't asking the question for their sake. I genuinely

had the stupid question. That was my question. And so it wasn't as if I'm thinking, oh, I'm gonna ask a question because for the benefit of others, no, no, no, no. It was like. This is an altruistic, this is completely selfish. No, I was just a stupid guy who was naive enough to say, I don't know what you're talking about.

Nailed it. So a good parallel to what I've done on the show, I ask, you know, thousands of questions to you, to people on this podcast. The questions that get the most praise or thanks in the comments are when I'll say, what's that word mean? Someone used the word, uh, buy valve the other day. And what's that? It's like an oyster.

Oh, thank you. Those are the most, I thought that I didn't know what a buy valve, I was the only one that wasn't buy valve piled on this podcast. And it turns out that other people are as well. So yeah, this goes all the way up. It's outside of school, it's outside of everything. Right, right.

And by the way, I am a born editor rather than writer and I edited magazines and wire. And this is something that I was doing that I would do when editing. Is I am representing the reader at that point, but mostly again, it's for me. And that it was, if I did not truly understand something, it was like, you got to explain it to me because I don't. What do you mean by that? What do you mean by that? Because I don't understand it.

And so, but there was also a balance, by the way, because there was also a tendency in journalism, particularly newspaper journalism, to have to explain everything over and over again, aiming to the kind of a levanyural, where for a while in the 90s. If you use the word DNA, you had explained you had to say DNA, that thing that you know, whatever.

It's like, I know what DNA is. I don't need to hear that. I suppose here's an interesting insight there. As new fields open up, the conceptual inertia hasn't propagated sufficiently quickly, which means that you end up with much more clunky articles for a short period of time until the whatever cultural over-tune window has caught up and now everyone's back in. Right, so it would be like here's the kind of test. You're going to write an article about something like, so you mentioned a word chat GBT. Do you need to explain it or not?

It depends on you writing for writing for your mom. Right, so my advice to the people at wired writers, this is my standard device to the writers, you're not writing to your mom, you're not writing to the 11th grader, you're writing to me. I am your audience. I am bored. You have to amaze me. And so if it's something, so you're trying to guess what is it that I know, of course, right? And so I know about chat to you, BT, so that in a while, it would definitely would not be explaining it by now. Transformer model, large language models, probably not. I don't know. But this is a balancing act between, you know, buy valve. Would I have to explain that in an article for Wired? I want to know what the article in Widers that's talking about oysters? Yeah, it's fascinating.

I think about it a lot on the show as well. How much brevity can I get away with? How much is too much? How much color brings people along for the ride? How much patronizes them? It's a real balancing act. And some days, you come in and you think, this is the first time that we have ever spoken about the evolutionary basis for bullying. I had this guy called Tony Volk on the show recently. Okay, I need to hear your definition. I need to hear why it's

adaptive. I need to hear who does it, whether it's heritable, that all the way down. And then you, as your learning goes on, but that's the perfect way that you said it. If you presume that you are somewhere close to the aggregate avatar of the audience that you're speaking to, when you learned it, did you need to explain it to you? Right. Did you need to go and do tons of research? If so, you may need to pass that on.

If not, if you thought, yeah, of course I know what that is. Maybe, you know, if you become intimately familiar with Bivalves, you're probably fine. So, when we were doing Wired, we had the advantage that we were starting Wired. And basically, there wasn't an audience. And so we said, we are making a magazine that we want to read. And basically, we're going to find other people who are like us.

Right? That's what we're doing. We're writing an article, so we're going to attract the people who are like us. Right? That's what we're doing. We're writing an article so we're going to attract the people who are like us. Okay? So, so if you talk at my level, we're going to attract people that are interested and turned out to be a lot of people wanted to have that kind of a conversation at our level. So we found them where they found us because they they would open up the thing and they would hear this conversation at our level and they would go, that's me.

This is my tribe. This is my tribe. You're talking at the right level that I'm at. Yep. Prototype your life. Try stuff instead of making grand plans. So this is really the subtitle of my book, wisdom I wish I had known earlier. It just took me way, way too long to kind of get there. There is a very, in what's the word I want. Literal

meaning of prototyping where, you know, I do, I make a lot of stuff. I can't show you, but I make, I've been a maker all my life. I'm making things still and it took me a long time to get to understand that you can only make a really great thing by prototyping it along the way. This even this I've now taken it to heart and even this book I prototyped and made little versions of it bound books. These happened to have doodles that the publisher rejected. But excuse me. So I think that's the literal sense of actually, you know, when I'm making it writing a book, I'm going to literally write a first draft all the way through to the end, that will kind of be thrown away. The builder, people called, build one to throw away.

And then that idea of like making a chair all the way and then just to kind of discard it, to make the better one, that was just so, that was just so hard for me to kind of accept as a, as a efficient way to do it or is, as, as, because making one thing anyway to the end was such a, such a challenge and so hard that, you know, just doing it to throw away. It seemed crazy. But that is know just doing it the very way it seemed crazy But that is really what I discovered the only way you can make something really great and so This idea the expands to beyond is a project is to if you're trying to

start a business or something rather than quitting your job and start a business or something rather than quitting your job and getting a lot of money and making a five-year plan, you prototype it by trying something for a three weeks or just see how far you can do with 10 products or 10 items that you're trying to sell or make or you do with the Airbnb guides when they were prototyping Airbnb is you know they had some air mattresses and they were going door to door, taking pictures of people who were having the air mattress in their house.

And it was a prototyping stage. So it's low commitment, high leverage, learning, experiment, where you are iterating your way to a greater success. And that's, I think, the approach that works in life as well. I can't tell you the number of people that I've met who went through school, did a graduate degree, and wanted to become a lawyer. So they're in law school, and then they graduate within five weeks of working a law firm

that they realize they hated. They never once like did an internship or volunteered at a lawyer just to hang around to see what it was. You want to prototype. You just don't want to go that way. That's stress test your assumptions. Yes. The whole way. Your assumptions try out something, do a version of it. That's a mock-up. When we did our kitchen remodel, I did a full-scale model of the remodel in cardboard from refrigerator cardboard with duct tape. And then you can learn an incredible amount of seeing the real-sized things. Like, oh, this shouldn't be here, this should be over here, this should be a little bit higher. And that's the best approach, I think,

to both projects and life. I've got one of my favorite ones I came up with a number of years ago, which was a note to myself, which is perfectionism is procrastination, masquerading, and quality control. That's probably true for some people. I think a lot of people optimize for perfecting, rather than shipping at a pace required to work out

what works, because they never have to face real world rejection with failure by keeping everything behind the scenes. Right. And that's also something that I've learned again, from blogging and being at Wired was this idea of sharing your work really early before it's done in order to get feedback because what's done is really hard to change. And so there's this idea of writing out loud, I call it writing out loud, writing publicly

in verses. I mean, again, I'm always impressed by the fantastic musical Hamilton, the way that they workshopped that for a decade, just trying and trying in life and getting the feedback and changing it. And so that's the best time to get feedback is before you're done. Here's the other thing as well, involving somebody in the process of a creative work gets them to be more bought in than you can imagine. So I'm doing some live shows, solar live shows towards the end of this year. I'm going to

do some work in progress shows between now and then. I need to get in front of a room of 20 to 50 people before I stand at Leicester Square Theatre on a Sunday night sold out in London. And I'm going to have probably a laptop or an iPad attached to my hand. You know, it's going to be messy, there won't be music, it'll be blah, blah, blah. The money will go to charity for the people that come along. But I would wager that the people who get to say to their friends, I went to go and see that as in progress show, you know, and it was actually really interesting. So I got to observe it out loud.

I don't know. I blah, you know, we used to do this with, um, with club nights too. So I ran nightclubs for a very long time. Before we released the brand, what we would do is we would involve the most influential guys and girls that go out in party and town in the process. What, you know, if the room two music upstairs, do we want to go sort of more tech house or do we want to go more tropical house? We'd care about their feedback.

We wouldn't take their feedback on board. We knew what we wanted to do with regards to this event, but they would feel when the night was finally announced that they had almost a sense of ownership, they were emotionally invested. So yeah, I think asking people for feedback. And you'll have seen Jonathan Height is basically writing his book on Substack. And you know, this is the most direct example that I could think of to what you're saying. I wrote my book on my blog, and so it's the smart authors realize the value of this. And here's the thing you get. You get all the mistakes and corrections corrected very early, because the internet is really good at correction, right? And so, and then you get extra ideas of, well, did you think about that? Did you know about that? No, I didn't. Thank you so much.

And it's much more embarrassing to get that later on when it's published. So, yes, that aspect of writing out loud, of creating, you say collectively, creating with your audience, co-creating things, it's just super, super under, underappreciated and the often the hesitancy for people is, they're afraid someone's gonna steal their idea. This goes back to, don't be the best, be the only.

When you're the only, that's not a problem, okay? So I came to this kind of realization myself through my efforts at Wired where I was trying to assign story. We had story ideas and we have, here's a great story, we find writers to write these ideas. And I'd have an idea that I thought was really great and I just simply could not give it to anybody. I could not sell it to them. For years, I try again and again, try to kill off the idea. There's no good.

But then it would come back and I think it is good, but I just can't get anybody to write it. And then eventually I'd realize after a year, I said, oh, I have to write it. And while I was writing it, I didn't, there wasn't any competition. There wasn't, I could take my time because I had been trying to give it away for so long.

So this idea of like, now now when I'm working on something, I talk about it to everybody, hoping that someone will take it. Because if they take it, that means I don't have to do it. That wasn't for me. And so you can be generous if you're really trying to do something. You can be generous in sharing your work early because no one else is going to take it and if they do, good for them. So you should overcome that hesitancy about sharing things if you're really working on something that's only you. Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. Yeah.

We understand, you know, humans, I think animals feel pain. We don't think that they suffer very much in that way that we do. So it's sort of, yeah, we feel pain that's inevitable, but we can turn it into suffering by What's the word by being victimized by it and so if we decide that? This is pain and we will try and deal with the pain We don't have to suffer and I think the difference is

Here's what it is. I think pain is outside, suffering is internal. Pain is an external thing, and suffering is more of an identity. And you don't want that pain to become your identity. You want it to be something that is a trait, something that you are, something that surrounds you rather than something that's integral to you. One of the ways you learn optimism and teach optimism to kids and optimism is a skill you can learn is to understand that as a kid, setbacks are only temporary. They're not your identity.

You're not saying, oh, I am an unlucky person. And suffering has a little bit of that sense of an acceptance of a fate of an identity rather than pain, which is external and can be overcome. You can't reason someone out of a notion that they didn't reason themselves into. So I have another aphorism that I'm working on that I haven't really published it and so I don't have the words down. But most arguments are not about the argument.

They're usually, usually, they're usually about something else at an emotional level, something else that identity the level, something else that subconscious level. And so that's where a lot of our views come from. Most of the views are inherited, they're given to us. We kind of accumulate them without even being aware of it. And so trying to get out of that through a logical process is just simply usually not going to work. And that's why I say one of the best ways to change someone's mind is to listen to them very carefully and try to understand why they believe what they're believing. And you actually get more, you get

further along in helping them change your mind that way than actually by arguing with them Yeah, it's a it also probably saves you know for a lot of time right from trying to Drowning yourself while trying to save somebody else who refuses to swim in whatever argument they're doing right I have a friend who's got a Gwinda's theory of bespoke bullshit Many don't have an opinion until they're asked for it. At which point, they cobbled together a viewpoint from Wim and half remembered he is say before deciding that this two minute old makeshift opinion will be then you hill to die on. Right, well, somewhere else I give advice that you have, you can get more respect

for your opinions if you're able to be able to state the other side as well as the other side could. And that you really shouldn't be offering your opinions unless you are prepared to kind of be able to explain it to that level of understanding the other side. And so that's again, that's a very high bar and this should be a high bar for for pontificating on to controversial things is that you should be able to state the other side to the satisfaction of the other. Along now we ran a debate series and that was one of the conditions of the debate, was once I would state their premise or their idea. And the other side had to restate it to the satisfaction of that first one before

you can move on. And that's, by the way, that's a pretty big hurdle for a lot of people. Well, this is the thing about being convinced by anything. You don't really get to choose what you're convinced by. There are degrees of self-deception that people can go through and sort of willful self-deception as well, I suppose. But if you were convinced by the thing that the other side is convinced by, you would also be convinced by it. So it is very important and it's such a good tool, steel manning, it's such a good tool

to turn down the volume of antagonism and adversarialness that occurs. I'm currently writing a book at the moment and everything that we're doing in it is to give theory of mind from one group to another group. Right. Look, have you ever considered what it's like to be this person? Have you ever considered what it's like to be the other person? Right. Here, as soon as you do, you just realize, oh, God, yeah, maybe, maybe it's not overblown. Maybe, maybe they genuinely do have a case here. Maybe they do genuinely suffer in ways that I couldn't foresee.

Yeah, absolutely. And usually it's not a lack of information or information itself that, that is changing people's minds. And so, yeah, so you don't have to attend every argument that you're invited to. Trust me, there is no them. Yeah. I want to a little hard to explain, but that's born out of my own experience and working with my kids, too. more and out of my own experience and working with my kids to, there's no them because most people are not because of incompetency rather than anything else. I mean, they're just the them that you would imagine requires a degree of competency and collaboration and whatnot to work. And that's

why power, you know, being paranoid is not really useful because the universe isn't really conspiring. It's just not capable of it. And so that then doesn't I want to be sure to indicate that there is there are systems that have a prejudice. There is systematic racism in the world. So there is a there is a system that will be biased, but there's still not a them there because he because the people who involved in that system are not even willing and not necessarily collaborating and they're not being deliberate. So the individuals are not the them. There can be certainly a system that is biased, but when you meet someone, it's not to

them and there's no real ability to conspire against you in the way you might imagine. I've come upon the exact same thing. I've just given it a different name. So Andrew Schultz, comedian from New York, very funny guy, he taught me this lesson and I renamed it Schultz's Razor. So it's not coordination, it's cowardice. Schultz taught me a great lesson during our episode, and this is him, quote,

a lot of the time we believe that there is a grand plan at work to try and push a narrative or hurt people from a particular group. From the outside, it looked like a coordinated assault, collusion orchestrated by some malign overload conspiracy. But on the ground, it doesn't look anything like that. It's just individuals trying to save their own skin and not get fired. They've got an expensive house they can barely pay the mortgage on, and a wife who wants a new car and private school for their kids.

It is much easier to just adhere to whatever ideology will keep them in their job rather than go against it. Sure, it might mean that they push an unhinged story about children or bans somebody for saying something innocuous from a platform, but this doesn't mean that they've been indoctrinated into some grand plan. The incentives encourage execs, influential actors, and the people in power to behave in particular aligned ways. But their coordination is not consciously conducted.

It's just the path of least resistance for each person. Yeah, I agree. That's a very good description of it. So all that's true, and then I would reduce it to, there's no them. There's no them. I should have just said there's no them. That would have been quick. Ten to the small things, more people are defeated by blisters than mountains. And by the way, there's again two literal things of this. I do these walk-and-talks where we invite people and we walk. And there are people who are very fit, who are very healthy,

and they could climb a mountain, but they were just brought low by a little tiny blister because they had bought new shoes. Don't ever buy new shoes for a long hike. And so, so yeah, the small things metaphorically can bring down. So you do want to make sure that you pay your taxes, right? And you do want to make sure that your bank counts are balanced and all that kind of stuff. In order to do the really great things that you are called to do. I often think about the very normal everyday things that the most excellent people have to do. This really points the finger at it quite nicely. There's another one here, and this, I think, might be the one that resonated with me the most, despite the fact that it's the least applicable to me.

You lead by letting others know what you expect of them, which may exceed what they expect of themselves, provide them a reputation that they can step up to. I thought that was very, very interesting. Yeah. I think I got a little bit from Steve Jobs in his attitude of leadership of really, and I had a track coach, it was the same thing, is like, he led by leading me to believe in my capabilities beyond what I believed myself. And he kind of pointed to this things and believed that I would get there there and I did get there, even though I didn't see that. So he kind of led me into stepping up myself and I see that in great leaders and people who work with them getting their best. And there was this belief and the person seemed unreasonable to time who demanded a certain level of excellence

and performance that the employees at the time didn't really think was possible, but this person knew, could see in them that they were capable and led them by expecting it from him. How can people become better, either as recipients or as broadcasters, of finding that balance between tyranny and desperation? It is, you're right, it is a balance because by the way, Steve Jobs is a really mean guy

who certainly went overboard with this in his demands. I think you have to look at the people that you are guiding whether they remain healthy. If they're truly, if their marriages are suffering, if their children are complaining about them, if other things in their life are not working, then you're probably pressing too hard. If you're really, this works and enlarges the wholeness of a person at its best. If it's not doing that that then it's probably too much. So I think this was the Amish, the story of the Amish who are still deciding about new technology in which to accept it and they will let the early adopter Amish, there are early adopter Amish, adopt new things but they were saying we're watching you and your family and how you treat people and what you're doing with your day as an evaluation of whether you should continue

to use this stuff. And so that idea of Steve Jobs' weakness was probably not in paying attention to that whole person, just looking at their performance at work and forgetting the fact that this would be having an impact on the rest of them. If they were paying attention to that, you could see whether or not this was a positive for them or a negative. Right now, no matter your age, these are your golden years.

The good stuff will yield golden memories, and the bad stuff will yield golden lessons. Yeah. These are your golden years. It's not when you're 70. It's like right now, you are living in your golden years. It's not when you're 70. It's like right now you are living in your golden years this is it and That is going back to your kind of like your best bad day These are your best bad years in a certain sense. It's like, yeah, no, you want to celebrate this year

because this is as good as it's going to get. Which would be true for next year too. But this idea of kind of celebrating the present as the best. And I have a friend who, well, his name is Hugh Howey. He's now this week, last week, his new story was put on to Amazon Prime, the silo stories. One of my friends has told me that I need to watch that. It was written by Hugh and he started off writing. He was a bookstore clerk and he started writing the little chapters that were put on Amazon and he made succeeded beyond this dream. But the thing was, was optioned and taken through many, many steps. And it was like, each time it was go through and then it would be fail and then someone else would pick it up and then there would be casting and it would collapse there. And there was this thing. And he was saying what

he learned to do was that each time it moved to a step ahead, he would celebrate as if as far as it was going to go. Like it was option. Okay, we're going to have a celebration because it's probably not going to go any beyond that. And so at every moment, he's celebrating the thing as if that was the victory. Yeah. So you do the sense of these intermediate victories become, you accept

them as that, well, it may not go any further than that. So we're going to celebrate this. And I think you can do the same thing with your years. It's like, you may not have additional years. So why not celebrate this? And that's the best year of your life. I think a lot of people presume that if they give themselves an out in some regard, if they celebrate too much, that it's going to kill their drive. But if you look at the relative balance between how much people over-selebrate and how much people over-wip themselves, flagulate themselves because they're not, they're pure it and work ethic, it's way more on the other side. There's a related concept that I learned about called deferred happiness syndrome. The common feeling that your life has not begun, that your present reality is a mere prelude

to some idyllic future. This idyll is a mirage that'll fade as you approach, revealing that the prelude you rushed through was in fact the one to your death. Yeah, I think you're right. There's no prelude, right? This is it. And that's another piece of advice that I wrote recently, this not in the book, which is don't save the best China and the best wine for some date that's never gonna happen. Use them as much as possible now because this is the time to celebrate.

Scratch the Rolex, yeah, I agree. Whenever you have a choice between being right or being kind, be kind, no exceptions, don't confuse kindness with weakness. Yeah, yeah, so, you can't be too kind, that's true. And that's, it's related to another piece of advice I have about attendees, many funerals, as you can, and let's do what people say

My observation was having done this recently is Almost nobody talks about the achievements of the departed they talk about What they were like how they made them feel whether they were kind or funny or? Helpful and so those are the qualities that we remember and that means in certain sense whether they were kind or funny or helpful. And so those are the qualities that we remember and that means in a certain sense, they may become the most important qualities that we have and kindness is always at the forefront. And it's a kind of empathy and a kind of,

it's an acceptance of the general, I think it's being realistic about the actual state of humans, which is that we tend to be at our heart, kindhearted, helpful, and selfless, given all things being equal. And what we're taught in school that we're selfish as a premise is wrong. And if you accept the fact that kindness is always recorded and people will be kind to you in return, which is really weird. But there is this weird paradox, which is that the more you give, the more you get, and that's true for everybody, and mathematically, that does not add up up but that is the foundation of the universe and when you're kind it's probably the most selfish thing you can do. Correct. People are going to treat you their best. And so weirdly paradoxically the selfish thing you can do is to be kind. What would be a scenario where you need to make a choice between being right or being kind?

scenario where you need to make a choice between being right or being kind. Oh, all the time. Particularly like, I don't know, if there's, you told someone, you tried to help someone, they didn't do what you suggested and it didn't work out. Being right would be reminding them about that, that you were right. Being kind would be not to mention that. That's just one kind of trivial example, but there is all the time, I see this in marriages all the time, where you can be like, yeah, I can be right. This is this is the thing to do, but the kindness will suggest you do it. So my wife and I have this thing where we can overtake them always

being right. And so this is the idea this idea is like, you're always right. I'm gonna, it's right. And that's kindness and not rightness. Because we're not saying whether they're really right, you're saying we're treating you as if you're right. So that's, that works. That, that, it works very, very powerfully because, because basically it is in alignment

with the general drift of the universe of humanness, which is that we are basically kind. The other thing it does is it accounts for our irrationality. You know, we're not utility optimizers. Right. If we were, then you would always want the most right answer at all times. Right. But you're not, you're emotional. And you're going to take things not based on the facts,

but based on the way that you feel. It's another really great quote that I love that says, karma is just you repeating your patterns, virtues and flaws until you finally get what you deserve. Well, C.S. Lewis talked about his definition of heaven and hell. It's that heaven and hell are basically taking take you as you are right now and what you're becoming and just make it infinite. Right? So whatever you are. So if you're kind of a person who's been cheating people and is just kind of out

for themselves and it's like, okay, you just keep extending that infinitely. That's hell, if you're a person doing your better and going a little bit better, that's heaven. So it's your current trajectory just multiplied by infinity. Kevin Kelly, ladies and gentlemen, Kevin, I really appreciate you. I think this works fantastic. As like I say, the fledgling aphorist in me

is really, really impressed by this excellent advice for living. Everybody should go and check that out. Is there anything else anywhere else that you want to direct people? Not really. I appreciate the attention people can find me at my website, which is my initials, kk.org. I'm on the socials as well, where I publish my art every day. I do have a recommend newsletter which we've done for six years. It's free every Sunday and it's the recommended stuff is one page. And you'll... So people can sign up for that.

But mostly take a look at the book and by the way, the one thing I've learned about doing this recently is that if you have kids, generally the kids won't pay any attention to the rights you give but you can point them to a book, the other expert, and they'll pay attention to that. So it really works great in that respect. Kevin, thank you very much for today. Thank you. I really appreciate it. It was fun